On "The Golden Notebook"

It's been almost two weeks since Doris Lessing's Nobel Prize announcement. Since then, I'd finally had the drive to read The Golden Notebook, which had been gathering dust on my shelf for several months. I'm halfway through, and it's been more than a week, so I guess I'm reading at a slower pace than usual. The novel, as well-written and structurally unique as it is, is a geyser of ideas, that sometimes I just had to take a rest to comprehend what I had just read. Two years ago, I may have found this compelling. I remember reading The Brothers Karamazov and completely immersing myself in what Dostoevsky had to say about the human condition. I fell in love with its characters and lingered over its philosophy and psychological insight. I still think Dostoevsky's the greatest writer of all time, but I can't help right now but feel that his novels are sad cases of blatant misanthropy.

Today that's what I am thinking about Lessing's most famous work. It is so crammed with well-written, intelligent, and most of all, credible ideas that it depresses me. I'm halfway done, but all the ingredients are already there. Suicide, unrequited love, mental illness, and social personal insecurities all make cameos. Yes, and there's the thing that Lessing has been trying to dissociate readers from since its publication, the progressive feminism. The work though, as a novel, is an amazing piece of literature. That is, if you don't succumb to its bleakness. I have, and it's not healthy. But every time I get to read a novel like this, I constantly remind myself of what movie critic Roger Ebert always says about movies, and I tend to feel the same way about literature:

"No good movie is depressing. All bad movies are depressing."